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  She didn’t tell Portman about the money. She figured it wouldn’t look good if there was an element of stolen money in her story.

  CHAPTER 9

  WIDOW PULLED UP IN THE MONTE CARLO, riding in the backseat with one Glock in his hand. The other still in his pocket. Muzzle of the first was jammed to the back of one of the gangbanger’s necks. Through the gap between the headrest and the seat.

  The gangsta drove, slowly, down a one-way street and turned left onto another until he stopped the car right alongside an actual church.

  Widow looked up at it. He was part amazed and part dumbfounded.

  He said, “It’s a real church?”

  The guy said, “Yeah, man!”

  “Capone’s in there?”

  “You got it, man.”

  “Put the gear into park.”

  The gangsta did as he was told.

  Widow said, “Turn off the ignition.”

  The gangsta turned the ignition.

  “Get out. Slow.”

  The gangsta opened the door and slipped out. Widow followed with the rear door. He stood up, tall, and kept a dead stare at the gangsta. They were the only two riding in the part of the car that was meant for passengers. Except for the original driver, who was still out cold on the passenger side of the front bench.

  The gangsta said, “What now?”

  “How many guys he got in there?”

  “None.”

  “None?” Widow asked.

  “Yeah. We it. We the whole army.”

  “Who else am I gonna find in there?”

  “No one. Just the Greecers.”

  “Greasers?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like mechanics? Guys who like cars?”

  “No, man. Greecers. Like the country. They just customers that hang around Capone. Most of them are girls. They get so blazed we call ‘em Greecers like they up there, with the gods, man.”

  Widow shook his head.

  “You guys are weird.”

  “Now, take the keys. Walk to the back of the car.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Do what I say!”

  The guy walked to the back of the car. He went slowly. He went with the knowledge that he was going in the trunk with the other two guys. Which Widow had thought of. And that thought put a smile on his face. Jamming three big gangbangers into the trunk of a Monte Carlo wasn’t the worst idea in the world. But he didn’t think there would be enough room. Not for all three of them to be stuffed in there. Lid closed. And still be alive the next morning, or however long it took for the cops to find them.

  Instead of shoving the guy into the trunk, Widow gave him a solid blow to the back of the neck. The medulla oblongata. All the wiring for the brain. The important stuff.

  First, he told the guy to open the trunk. This put the guy in front of him, bending at the waist, shuffling forward. Waiting like he knew something was coming. And not being able to do a thing about it.

  Next, Widow reversed the Glock in his hand, repositioned it as a clubbing weapon. Not the best gun to use as such a tool, but combined with Widow’s sledgehammer fist, it would do a pretty good job.

  With one devastating blow, like Paul Bunyan slamming down an axe, he hammered the gangbanger right in the back of the brainstem. Crushing the power box to the brain.

  The guy launched forward like he was catapulted off his feet, and slammed his face into the car’s trunk lid. He hit teeth first. Between the four of them, these guys had lost a lot of teeth. Which Widow figured they wouldn’t really mind. It seemed like they were meth heads. And the two things that meth heads didn’t seem mind losing was their money and teeth.

  Widow looked around. He looked up the street, and then back down it. He looked in front of the church. Checked the windows. Checked the alley on the side.

  He saw a trashcan fire in the small courtyard of the church. There was a rod iron fence surrounding it. But no people. No guards. No homeless people. No one.

  He stepped back and waited for the gangbanger to slide off the rear of the car and down off the bumper. Then he stepped back forward and rolled the guy under the back bumper of the car with his foot.

  The gate to the courtyard wasn’t missing, but it was stripped off its hinges and sprawled out on a concrete sidewalk that ran out in front of the church.

  Widow read the church sign on the way in, hard not to. It was big, and posted to the front entrance to the church at the top of wide concrete steps. Whatever the denomination had been, that part of it had long been stripped away. In its place was the word “Capone” in all capital letters. It read: CAPONE CHURCH.

  Which should have been CAPONE’S CHURCH or CHURCH OF CAPONE. But Widow wasn’t there to give this guy a grammar lesson.

  Widow shook his head as he passed the sign. This guy, Capone, was about the biggest joke he had ever seen as far as criminal enterprises went. If the gangbanger had been telling the truth, then there wasn’t much to his organization. The four street guys, who only had two guns between them, and a bunch of stoned idiots waiting inside the church.

  Not much to it at all. Which might’ve explained why the cops ignored this, for now. They might’ve had bigger fish to fry, bigger concerns to worry about, over some two-bit hoodlum who fancied himself to be a crime lord from the nineteen-twenties.

  Widow didn’t bother looking for a back entrance to the church. He walked right in. No problems.

  The inside wasn’t much of any kind of house of worship, almost as much as it wasn’t a suitable place for a self-respecting crime lord to live. The inside looked more like an abandoned community center that was refurbished into a crack house.

  Only a small number of pews remained. Most of the floor was exposed. Along the walls and corners, he saw bodies of people lying around, talking, whispering. He saw drug paraphernalia. Most of the people along the inside of the church were rail thin. There were women, men, some teenagers. It was hard to tell exactly, because the only light was candlelight. Only Widow noticed as he walked in, it wasn’t candlelight. It was more closely related to torchlight, because there were no candles. There were only barely controlled fires set around the corners of the church in trashcans.

  Widow looked around, studied the people as best he could. He wasn’t sure that every one of them was even alive. The place didn’t smell the best. And many of them weren’t moving. That was probably because they were passed out, high, or both. But he would’ve been surprised if some of them were dead, and no one around them realized it.

  The roof was high. Maybe twenty feet off the ground, maybe twenty-five.

  Stained-glass windows beset the upper walls of the church. Widow looked up, saw each window depicted a scene from the Bible. All of the Jesuses had their faces shattered, like someone took to throwing bricks through them. There was broken glass all over the floors underneath them. The only faces in the panes that remained unbroken were of the devil. That was obvious because of the red skin, the goat hooves, and the horns on a human face.

  The church was Capone’s own little slice of hell.

  Widow walked farther in, through the church doors, which were wide open. He stopped dead in front of a long pathway. It was the only thing not littered with used drug needles and broken crack pipes. On the left side of the pathway, Widow saw why it was clean. There was a scrawny man with a broom. He was virtually shirtless because his shirt had been torn to shreds. He walked barefoot. And he was mumbling to himself.

  The church was essentially a junkie’s paradise. Everyone had to be somewhere.

  Jack Widow had never been an addict to drugs. Although, if it was anything like coffee addiction, then he could empathize. He could see how someone might fall prey to such a life. He had seen it in the military. He had seen it in foreign countries. When you lived under a dictatorship or a theocracy or an oppressive regime, and you had no source of legitimate income, no way out, then drugs were the only cheap way to escape.

  Widow walked up the path, keeping o
ne Glock in his hand, being mindful that the other was in his front pocket. He kept his face forward, chin down. His eyes scanned from left to right and back, checking the corners, checking faces. He was stopped right there in the middle of the pathway by the junkie with the broom.

  “Who…who are you?” the guy mumbled.

  “I’m looking for Capone,” Widow said.

  “And who…who are you?”

  “Where is he?”

  The guy jittered and danced from foot to foot. He started scratching his bare forearms, which were the size of spatulas, and just as breakable.

  He asked, “What is…What is this in reference to?” Like a receptionist taking a phone message.

  “Where is he?” Widow asked. He stretched his neck out and stood up as tall as he could go, like he was a bear showing off its size and stature to a trespasser on its territory. At six-foot-four, he towered over the junkie. He towered over most people.

  Fear overcame the junkie’s face. That was obvious. And he said, “I’m not…not supposed to let anyone past. Boss is with a new girl. No…no one interrupts when he’s with a new...new girl.”

  In a fast, violent movement, Widow racked the slide on the Glock in his hand and the chambered bullet ejected out the top. It flew up into the air. No spin. He caught it almost as fast as he had racked the slide in the first place. With his right hand, he slid it down his palm until it reached his index finger. He pinched it between his index and middle fingers. He showed it to the junkie.

  He said, “See this?”

  The junkie swallowed, hard.

  “I see…see it.”

  “This is a nine-millimeter parabellum.”

  The junkie stared at it with a kind expression of both recognition and finality on his face.

  “It’s a bullet.”

  “I know…know it’s a bull…bullet.”

  “Good. Then you know the thing about bullets, right?”

  “Wha…what?”

  “There’s a bullet for everybody.”

  The broom junkie swallowed hard, again.

  “This one is for you.”

  The junkie swallowed one last time and started to back away, only there was nowhere to back away to. Unless he planned to turn and scramble up ten feet to the nearest window and jump out it. Which was not going to be as fast as a bullet in the ass. Any right-minded person would know that. But junkies were not right-minded people, not in Widow’s experience.

  Which was why he kept his guard up, kept checking his six. Even though he outweighed this guy by double, maybe triple digits, drugs made people do all sorts of crazy things. Especially heavy drugs like meth, which seemed to be the drug of choice for most of the church people. Widow could see it on his skin, on his teeth or lack thereof.

  Widow asked, “Where is Capone?”

  The junkie looked at the nine-millimeter bullet, and then at Widow. He said, “Priest bedroom.”

  No stutter, this time.

  The junkie turned back to the altar, up the middle of the path, and pointed at a door in the back wall.

  “Thank you!”

  Widow pocketed the bullet in case he needed it. Which he doubted. He had plenty more in the magazine. He knew. He had checked. But he did rack the slide and chamber the next bullet in line.

  He left the guy there with the broom. The broom junkie returned to sweeping, with no real plan or order to his madness.

  Widow walked up the pathway, up to the altar. There he saw a huge broken crucifix, erected on metal legs at the bottom, like a Christmas tree. Most of the bottom half was undamaged, unimpeded.

  The top half was broken off at the arms. The top half lay on the floor.

  Widow ignored it and passed it. He headed straight for the door. When he got there, he didn’t knock. He grabbed the knob and turned it. Slow. The knob moved. No lock. He opened the door and walked through a dark passageway, treading down a couple of steps. His shoe touched down onto thick red carpet at the bottom.

  The interior of the room was huge. It looked more like a king’s throne room rather than a clergyman’s bedchambers. The thick red carpet continued. There was crown molding on the ceilings, and a huge, stone fireplace at the back wall.

  The fireplace looked like an afterthought. It wasn’t a part of the original priest’s dwellings. But it had been nicely added on. Which was weird. Like Capone, or whoever, had run the clergy out of the church, and then hired a contractor to come in and install it.

  The rest of the room was also lavish, and gaudy. There were two wooden dressers lined up on one wall. There were two dense sofas and two armchairs. There was a bar cart parked in one corner, fully loaded. One open vodka bottle was half empty.

  In the fireplace, a fire blazed on, not roaring, but enough to dimly light the entire room well enough to see everything. Dark shadows danced in the lower corners from the fire.

  At the center of the bedroom was a huge Victorian bed, all wood and blankets and sheets. Drapes hung from lofty bedposts made of wood and decorated with abstract carvings. In the softly lit room, Widow saw what looked like a pile of bodies on the bed. Not dead, but piled in a heap.

  Widow saw soft-moving limbs and joints and human appendages. He saw skin. And he heard hot breathing and panting.

  Then he heard a man’s voice.

  “Who the hell is there?”

  Widow walked over to the bed like a monster in a nightmare. His eyes adjusted in the dimness quickly. His eyes had been trained to adjust fast in darkness. In his military career, he had spent a lot of time in the dark.

  Widow saw a naked man and a half-naked woman. The woman wasn’t talking, but her eyes were moving.

  Widow switched the Glock to his left hand and reached out, slammed his right hand onto the sheets around the naked man. He jerked the guy off the bed and onto the floor.

  “Hey!” the guy screamed.

  On the floor, Widow could see him better. He was a white man. No visible tattoos. No visible scars. He looked about forty. Partially balding in the front. He didn’t have a grill in his teeth, like one of his guys had.

  If Widow had seen him on the street, he would have never pegged him as a guy that anyone would follow around and call their boss. Certainly he didn’t look the part. He didn’t look like any kind of a criminal mastermind.

  Widow asked, “You Capone?”

  “Oh God! Are you her father?”

  Her father?

  Widow didn’t look back. That could be a trap, a ruse. He knew that. Capone didn’t look like any kind of threat, but that was exactly how he had gotten to be a local crime boss, probably. The guy was low-level and slapdash, but still a crime boss.

  Widow had seen it before. Cops and criminals, and almost everyone else, could easily be fooled by a guy who looks like he belongs in the suburbs, but not running a small drug territory in a small neighborhood in Hollywood.

  Widow reared his foot up and crashed it down on Capone’s inner right thigh. A severe attack. The guy cried out in pain. Then Widow repeated the attack for good measure. Same heavy foot in a thick shoe. Same relentless force behind it. If Widow dialed it up one more degree, he’d be snapping bone. And probably ripping through a major artery.

  Capone screamed and wailed in agony.

  “Are you Capone?” Widow asked again. His voice steady. His demeanor calm.

  The guy rocked on his naked butt, clutching his inner thigh. Tears welled up in his eyes.

  Widow aimed the Glock at the guy’s inner thigh, the same bruised spot he had crushed with his shoe. The guy stared up at him.

  Widow fired a bullet into the floor, inches away from the guy’s thigh. The gunshot was deafening in the stony priest chambers. It echoed and bounced off the walls.

  “I won’t ask again.”

  “Yes!” the guy said. “I’m Capone. Who the hell are you?”

  Widow reversed his position and circled around over Capone so that his back was to the fire and not to the door. He didn’t want to get any surprises like arme
d guards that he didn’t know about.

  A wide shadow fell over Capone.

  Widow looked at the woman on the bed. She moved, but slowly, groggily. Her small hands grabbed at a single sheet and pulled it up to her chin.

  After getting a good look at her face, he noticed something about her that he hadn’t before. She wasn’t a woman. She was a girl.

  Widow asked, “Are you okay?”

  The girl shivered and said, “I think so. Yes, sir.”

  “How old are you?”

  “She’s old enough!” Capone squealed.

  Widow jackknifed another vicious stomp onto his right thigh, same exact place. Same exact heavy shoe. Different stomping position.

  Capone screamed, again.

  The girl whimpered, and said, “Eighteen.”

  Widow frowned, furrowed his brow like he did when he wanted the truth from someone.

  “How old are you really?”

  She looked down at Capone, like she was seeking approval from him. Like he would tell her what to say. But Capone said nothing. He knew better.

  She looked back up at Widow, with terror in her eyes. She said, “Sixteen.”

  “How old?”

  “She said she was sixteen!”

  Widow popped Capone in the back of the head once, with the Glock.

  “I wasn’t asking you!” he said and looked back at the girl in the bed.

  “Where are your parents?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “They’re home. I guess.”

  “Where’s home?”

  She told him the name of what sounded like a suburb, probably outside the city.

  Widow asked, “Are you drugged?”

  She didn’t speak.

  “Did he give you something?”

  She nodded.

  “Cocaine?”

  “Crystal,” she answered.

  Meth, Widow thought.

  Capone writhed and retched around. He said, “My leg. I think I need a doctor.”

  “He gave it to you?” Widow asked, again.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Your parents. They know where you are?”

  She shook her head.

  “No. I left.”

  “You ran away?”